‘“To the United States of France and Ireland”: revolutionary circulations between France and Ireland during the Age of the Atlantic Republic. The case study of the 1793 anti-Militia Riots’

International audienceIn1798, the Irish rose up against the Anglo-Irish government. The insurgents came from two secret societies: the United Irishmen, inspired by the French Revolution and founded mainly by Presbyterians in 1791 in Belfast and Dublin, and the Defenders, a Catholic society that had appeared in the 1780s in County Armagh before spreading to the whole of Ireland in the 1790s. The revolt was soon put down by government forces, causing about 30,000 dead (90% of whom were among the insurgents) and a profound trauma within Irish society, contributing to the deep divisions between Catholics and Presbyterians, and immediately causing the union between Ireland and Britain in 1800-1801.The classical and ‘revisionist’ historiographies of the 1790s in Ireland hold that the Irish Catholics’ and especially the secret society of the Defenders’ participation in the so-called ‘Rebellion’ of 1798 was fueled by religious fanaticism and ignorance. It was thereby bereft of the enlightened, secular republicanism of the United Irishmen who had failed to convert their allies to their views. Another historiography, inspired by subaltern studies, sees in the Catholics ‘rebels’ more resemblance with the rebels in the Vendée or the Sanfedisti of Southern Italy. These historiographies reflect the views of the victors, those charged with putting down the revolt and their victory. It permitted a sectarian analysis of the revolt, depriving the Irish Catholics of both their agency and autonomy and confining them to their supposed remoteness and isolation from the circulation of revolutionary, republican, enlightened ideas, or receiving them only through the mediation of the United Irishmen.Against this view, it is possible to trace connections between republican France and Ireland through ‘vectors of revolution’, i.e. Irish republicans who navigated back and forth between France and Ireland. Following the paths of these propaganda agents, priests, publicists, spies allows to reconstruct their networks, showing an international, cosmopolitan world, deeply influenced by the ‘Catholicisme des Lumières’. It also permits to propose a new narrative of the emergence in Ireland of several heretofore apparently contradicting movements – Defenderism and republicanism – showing instead that they were deeply connected. In other words, Ireland saw the rise of an original and grassroots Catholic republicanism integrated in a wider revolutionary and republican Atlantic. In tracing these connections, it is possible to further define the still-contested concept of Atlantic Revolution, giving it content: the Atlantic Revolution was, first and foremost, an Atlantic Republic, a space formed from networks of circulations. In this talk, I will try to outline these circulations by focusing on a particular case: the role of these flows in the 1793 anti-Militia riots that wracked almost all the country and which were a crucial moment in the spread of Defenderism throughout the Catholic communities in Ireland